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Animating Mouth Movement with Wiggle
I’m trying to animate the mouth movement of a character I’ve photoshopped. I know how to do this with the wiggle expression, but I’m trying to add an if/else statement that stops the movement from going any higher than a certain point, so that the mouth doesn’t move too far up the face.
The code I’m trying to use right now is:
w = wiggle(5,thisComp.layer("Mouth Slider").effect("Slider Control")("Slider"));if(transform.position[1] > 474) [value[0], w[1], value[2]] else [value[0], valueAtTime(time)[1]+1, value[2]];
I’m fairly new to using expressions, but my thinking is that if the mouth is greater than the default “closed” position at y=474, then it will wiggle, but if that wiggle moves the mouth’s position to less than 474, it will stop wiggling and instead take the value at the current time and add 1 to it, which I thought would push the position back to 475, which would then restart the wiggle.
I think I’ve found a simpler way to animate this using a null layer, but I’m still curious to know if the logic I’ve used here is possible to code or whether it would be a lot more complex than this.
Any help is appreciated, thanks!
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4 Replies
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I can’t help you as I’m a novice but am interested in how you would use the wiggle expression for this.
How do you sync the movement to the sound?
Also, Mamo World do an auto lip sync plugin for AE that might be of interest, if you’ve not checked it out:
https://mamoworld.com/tools/auto-lip-sync -
To be honest, I’m still figuring it out.
Generally I’ll have a slider for the wiggle frequency and a slider for the amount, and I’ll always have a very slight, very quick wiggle going on (more of a stylistic choice inspired by the Funhaus YouTube channel’s style of editing), and then as the louder, more enunciated words come up, I’ll crank up the sliders for just those words, so the mouth opens up more. It doesn’t always work perfectly though, so I’m experimenting with ways to make it more streamlined.
I’m just now realizing that you can create key frames based on audio, so I wonder if I could link the mouth movement to the actual audio layer with some kind of linear function between the volume or pitch and the amount of mouth movement. I’ll have to look into that.
I’m also interested in that link you posted. I’ll check that out for sure. Thanks!
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I think your answer is going to be in using expressions somehow.
There are animated effects in AE that work off of the volume of the sound track (though I’ve not used them yet), so there must be a way of linking that parameter to the wiggle effect.
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I just came accross this page:
https://www.macprovideo.com/hub/after-effects/animating-with-sound-in-after-effects-part-1
which, at a glance, seems to be what you might be looking for. In their example, they are linking opacity of one layer to audio amplitude of another but you could maybe just link your wiggle to it instead? or link your mouth movement to it and then add the wiggle to the result to give it the look you’re after.
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